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Beginnings
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McEwan: Atonement
In this course Dr Allison Adler Kroll (PhD student, University of Oxford) explores Ian McEwan's 2001 novel, Atonement. The course begins with a discussion of the book's title – what is atonement? what is atoned for? – before moving on to discuss the epigraph from Austen's Northanger Abbey that precedes the novel proper. In the third and fourth modules, we think about the form and genre and the novel, before turning in the fifth module to think about some of the major characters – focusing especially on the implications of their names, e.g. Briony and the toxic plant white bryony, Cecilia and the Christian martyr St. Cecilia, Lola and Nabokov's Lolita. After that, in the sixth and seventh modules, we think about two of the major themes in the novel: metafiction and memory.
Beginnings
In this module, we provide a brief introduction to Ian McEwan himself before discussing the resonances of the word atonement. In Christian theology, Atonement describes the reconciliation of God and mankind through the death of Jesus. Who is the sacrificial victim here? who is being reconciled? and what is the crime for which reconciliation is needed?
Hi, My name is Allison Adler. Cruel.
00:00:02I'm a university lecturer in English literature. I've taught at U. C. L. A.
00:00:05And at UC Irvine, and I'm now doing a second doctorate in history at Oxford.
00:00:10I'm going to talk today about Ian McEwan's Atonement,
00:00:16and
00:00:19the first section
00:00:20is beginnings. I'll talk a little bit about Ian McEwan himself and his work
00:00:22and then the title of the novel and then its epigraph.
00:00:27Ian McEwan was born in 1948 and Aldershot, Hampshire
00:00:31to working class Scotsman. He'd worked his way up to the Army ranks to become a major.
00:00:35They lived all over the world until McCune was 12,
00:00:40and then they settled back down again in England.
00:00:43He went to the University of Sussex, where he read English literature,
00:00:46and then he did an MBA at the University of East Anglia in creative writing.
00:00:50He was part of that generation that came of age in the sixties and the seventies,
00:00:55something he's written about in his novel Sweet Tooth.
00:00:59And he became very well known for his early Gothic fiction, and indeed,
00:01:03he was called Ian Macabre for a while.
00:01:07He then came to concentrate on trauma and memory by most critics accounting.
00:01:10And he's seen as someone who likes to take a
00:01:17central trauma and then develop a story around it,
00:01:19which is, of course, something that happens in atonement as well.
00:01:22He also is a public figure and has often spoke in ways
00:01:27that have been sharply critical of
00:01:32the Blair government's involvement in Afghanistan,
00:01:34for example, and he's also spoken against extremism and other such thing.
00:01:37Um,
00:01:44he's very much sees himself as someone who is
00:01:44engaged in contemporary events and whose novels speak to
00:01:48the relationship between fiction and the contemporary and art
00:01:52and history moving on to the title Atonement.
00:01:56Many critics have left this whole aspect of the novel aside,
00:02:01which is quite interesting as it has such a long
00:02:05tradition
00:02:10in Christian and Judeo Christian culture and in our own culture, our secularised.
00:02:12Now it seems to be something that we don't often speak about,
00:02:17so naming an entire novel Atonement seems to be
00:02:21something of a bold move on McEwan's part.
00:02:24But what I want to talk about is two fold.
00:02:28This is a novel that is at once a consular room. On that is the rise of a writer.
00:02:32The rise of an artist.
00:02:37It's about how a writer develops.
00:02:39But embedded within that narrative is an historical romance,
00:02:42and
00:02:48the levels of atonement or the kinds of atonement that we encounter in
00:02:48the novel seemed to speak to those two aspects of the novel.
00:02:54And so I'll talk quite a lot about that during the course of this lecture.
00:02:58But for the very basics atonement, What does it mean?
00:03:02Well, it literally means at one ment, and that comes from the Latin
00:03:05origins of that word.
00:03:11But in its most basic definition,
00:03:13it's expiation, or reparation for a wrong or an injury,
00:03:16usually with the end of wanting some kind of reconciliation as a result,
00:03:21or some kind of harmonising
00:03:26that at one moment
00:03:29for the Christian sacrificial economy that exemplified by
00:03:30Christ sacrifice and death on the cross.
00:03:35It's for reconciliation, of humanity and the created world, in some sense, with God
00:03:38and in the Judeo Christians. Sorry.
00:03:46In the Judaic tradition,
00:03:49there is a sense prior to that of atonement being
00:03:51a kind of reconciliation between God and his people,
00:03:55his very specific people, the Israelites,
00:04:00but more in terms of a kind of purging of communal sin,
00:04:02um, for reconciliation,
00:04:08whereas in the Christian mode it's more of one man sacrifice for the good of all.
00:04:09And these are two things that I think are very important in the context of the novel,
00:04:15which in its third sentence is a personal atonement.
00:04:19That is,
00:04:23it's Brian is our express atonement for the crime
00:04:24that she committed against Robbie and against Yulia Cecilia.
00:04:29So
00:04:34the Christian sacrificial economy
00:04:35notion of atonement,
00:04:38the sacrifice of one figure for the reconciliation of the rest.
00:04:40How does this fit with the novel? Who is being sacrificed? And for what?
00:04:45Well, I think this speaks to both aspects of the novel. In a sense, Brian E.
00:04:51Sacrifices Robbie and Cecilia and their love for
00:04:57one another in order to become a writer.
00:05:01It's their tragedy that becomes the the impetus for her becoming an adult writer,
00:05:04and they are also sacrificed in the course of her sexual coming of age.
00:05:14And so, in a sense,
00:05:19it's about her development as a person as well as her development as a writer.
00:05:20On the other hand, there are sacrifices also, um,
00:05:25one in which the fragmenting world of the early 20th century.
00:05:29And all of the disruption and disarray that two world wars create is
00:05:36something that their tragedy is sacrificed to you or is a sacrifice,
00:05:43Um,
00:05:49in terms of our coming to terms with the memory of those huge events in world history.
00:05:50In other words,
00:05:58they're sort of exemplary sacrifices in that
00:05:59narrative of the 20 early 20th century.
00:06:02The scapegoat. Robbie is, in a sense, a scapegoat for Brian ease sexual confusion.
00:06:06But he's also in the larger course of the narrative, a sacrifice of war,
00:06:13a sacrifice in terms of his claws.
00:06:17And I think there is
00:06:21at once a survivor's guilt on the part of Brian E. In the context of her
00:06:22development as an artist in the terms of that consular romance
00:06:28genre that I've been talking about
00:06:33and also Survivor's guilt in terms of her.
00:06:36Having survived both Robbie and Cecilia in the context of the war,
00:06:39the historical romance, um, they both become sacrifices of war,
00:06:43and they purged communal sin in another sense, the sin of the West
00:06:50at Total War,
00:06:56the industrial war that Robbie talks about in his section Part two of the novel.
00:06:58Finally, it is this personal atonement. Brian E.
00:07:04Is writing this novel very specifically
00:07:08to make reparation,
00:07:12to make reparation for her,
00:07:14having accused Robbie wrongfully and to bring that truth out,
00:07:15but also as reparation for having innocence
00:07:20harvested his love for Cecilia and their romance
00:07:23for her right early development.
00:07:27There was a sense in which she wants to write this novel
00:07:30to prove the justice in some way of her taking that story and making it her story
00:07:34of making it her great novel of making it the story of how she came to be a writer.
00:07:41And there is a constant sense of guilt on her part.
00:07:48Um, sometimes it's expressed,
00:07:54but sometimes it's far more subtle than that there
00:07:56is wanting to put in order other people's worlds for
00:07:59the sake of your own writing this sense that you
00:08:02can take personal details from the world around you,
00:08:06things that memories and things that belong to other people,
00:08:10events that happen to other people and use them as material for your own writing.
00:08:14There's a sense that this novel is her atonement for that as well
00:08:20
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Adler Kroll, A. (2018, August 15). McEwan: Atonement - Beginnings [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/mcewan-atonement/form
MLA style
Adler Kroll, A. "McEwan: Atonement – Beginnings." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/mcewan-atonement/form